


A Picture Worth a Thousand Words

by animasevera



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Artist Fenris, Feels, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Mild Gore, Painting, blood but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 06:53:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16949130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animasevera/pseuds/animasevera
Summary: Fenris doesn't speak of his feelings often, but he has to get them out somehow. His reading and writing skills aren't quite up to the task, but there are other ways to put one's thoughts to paper.





	A Picture Worth a Thousand Words

When Fenris is alone in the mansion with his thoughts, he makes art. 

Many things are on his mind, many things that would kill him from inside if left to fester. He knows that people keep journals for this sort of thing, but keeping a journal would require being able to read and write. He’s not good enough at that yet, not good enough to translate it all. 

And some things just can’t be put into words. There’s no word for the screaming, no words for the _nothing_ where his memories should be, no word for the pain of lyrium burning under his skin at the touch, even from a trusted friend or lover. 

So, he uses pictures instead. It starts with pieces of charcoal from the fire, crushed into black dust and mixed with oil and applied to the tips of his fingers. He practices on old leaflets and handbills, learning the strokes he can make: Wide, narrow, sweeping, dots, filled spaces with the whole of a finger. Already, he gets ideas. Within a week, he’s drawing shapes and shadows. Within a month, he’s learning faces, creating images of objects. They’re far from realistic, but that doesn’t matter to him. He doesn’t need them to be. 

As he sits by the fire one evening, surrounded by handbills covered in charcoal paint, his fingers and palms stained completely black, something stirs to life inside him, leaping like a spark from the burning logs. It’s nothing like what he’s been feeling for so long - not the fear, the anger, the loss and void where anything besides Danarius’ magic should be. His heart skips beats, and his blackened fingers tingle. His chest swells with what he can only assume is pride, and he sighs in what he knows in others as satisfaction. The corners of his lips perk in genuine, craved pleasure. Whatever this feeling is, all he knows is that he wants more. 

He wants color. 

He wants the fiery glow of golden yellow, the living crimson of blood, the sky blue of freedom. He wants the rich green of lush trees in the Seheron jungle and the deep violet of red wine. 

_Wine._ He looks at the stains on the wallpaper in the den. It gives him ideas. The next time he comes home with fresh handbills, he takes a piece of cloth and dabs some wine from a dish onto the paper. It makes a rich purple-red hue, not unlike an expensive dye favored by many magisters. A status symbol, of which slaves were forbidden to partake. To think, he could create it right here and now with only his potable of choice, and nobody could stop him. 

A job with Hawke leaves him with a bit of extra coin. He knows exactly what to do with it, and makes a beeline for Hightown’s market district. Earlier that week, he had spoken to Varric and learned of something called “cochineal.” At first, he is confused and a bit disgusted - the substance apparently comes from crushed and powdered insects - but that is all forgotten when he discovers it at a merchant’s stall. It’s the deepest, richest red he has ever seen. He checks briefly with the dwarf to confirm, and buys as much as he can afford. 

He spends all night experimenting with the new pigment, mixing pinches with egg white until the true shade comes out in the stroke. He’s careful, sparing - he doesn’t want to waste a bit of it. He ends up with many, many shades of pink before he finally arrives at a bold red. A smirk of accomplishment crosses his lips, and he turns his hands up to look at the stains on his fingers, now just as red as the paint.

His smile drops briefly as he remembers times when these stains were not paint, but blood. Still-beating hearts, ripped from chests at Danarius’ order. He clenches his fists, growling to himself and cursing the fact that he could remember nothing of his life other than such servitude. He is a cipher shaped like an elf. Shaped like a _slave.  
_

“No.” 

He is no slave. 

Those days are over. If any blood so crimson should be shed, let it be Danarius. 

A flash of inspiration lights behind his eyes, and they narrow as his lip draws up in a snarl. He takes one of the test papers and a nearby fragment of wood, fidgeting about with the wood until he remembers how to hold a writing tool. Dipping it in the thick red liquid, he holds it to let it drip while he tries to remember how to spell Danarius’ name. He knows it starts with the same letter as “demon” and ends with the same letter as “snake” and there’s a part in the middle that starts with the sound of “never again.” That's as far as he gets. At this rate, though, he doesn’t care - it’s the name of his master, as far as he knows it. Taking up the stained paper, he strides over to the fire and throws it in over the flames. A furrow forms in lyrium-shocked brows as he watches the edges of the paper turn black and a glowing ring eat through the written name. As the paper turns to ashes, he fixes in his mind the image of his gloating, sneering former master being engulfed in his own flames from a fire spell gone wrong. 

It would be such a deserved end, almost poetic in its irony. Fenris didn’t fancy himself strong enough to kill Danarius on his own; the magister would likely use Fenris’ own powers against him, as he had once demonstrated by causing his hand to catch alight. It was brief and left no lasting damage, but the memory was etched into his being. Perhaps when the time came, when they met face to face again, Fenris would be strong enough - or perhaps have strong enough allies - to finally put an end to him and his depravity. 

He sits before the fire, staring into it until the dark blue afterimage dances blurrily in his field of view. 

_Yellow. Orange. Blue.  
_

More color. More than blood and wine and ashes. There has to be more to him than that. He wipes the sweat off his brow, carelessly leaving a red streak in his hair. 

He doesn’t care much, until a knock comes to his door. Every hair on the back of his neck stands at attention as his mind runs breakneck through the possibilities of who it might be - tax collectors, slaver spies, scavengers looking to break and enter…

“Fenris, are you home?” 

_Hawke. It’s just Hawke.  
_

It’s Hawke, and _he’s_ a mess. The whole room was a pig sty of paint and paper. Fenris sighs and mutters a curse to himself as he unlocks the door. “What is it, Hawke?” 

Hawke looks back at him with one of _those_ smirks that says she’s Up To Something. “Special delivery,” she announces, holding up a parcel wrapped in plain brown wheat paper. 

He gives her a skeptical eye as he takes the package. A tiny voice in his head anxiously whispers that it could be some kind of trick, but he reminds himself that this is just _Hawke_ who, if she _did_ have a problem, would not hesitate to confront him directly. The box is too heavy to open standing there, so he lowers it, and himself, to the floor. He grabs the knife from his belt and carefully slashes the paper and fiber twine away. 

Inside, he finds a small wooden crate, the sort one would ship potatoes to the market in. He turns from suspicion to bemused curiosity, briefly glancing up at Hawke as if judging her reaction. 

She only smiles wider. “Go on, open it.” 

He raises an eyebrow briefly, but shakes his head as he pulls the lid loose and peers inside. 

“…Jars?” 

One at a time, he takes the jars out for a better look. Inside each jar is a colored powder - yellow, blue, green, red, purple, black, white. 

“Wait, these are…paint pigments?” He is confused, but far from displeased. “How did you know–” He stops himself in the middle of the question as he recalls the conversation in which he learned about cochineal. “No, don’t answer that. Varric told you, didn’t he?” As he looks into the box again, he sees a small collection of brushes that had been hiding under the jars. “…And brushes?” He reaches in and scrabbles them up into one hand, laying them all out next to one another by the jars. There are twelve brushes in all - four broad, four medium, and four fine-points. At last, he discovers the palette knife tucked in the corner of the box. “And…what’s this, exactly?” 

“That’s a palette knife,” Hawke explains, beaming. “And yes, it was Varric.” 

A palette knife. Yes, he had heard of these - for mixing paint, and scraping it from the canvas. He turns the tool over in his hands, examining his diffused reflection in the metal. 

“So, he told you.” He keeps his face turned down from Hawke, hiding the growing smile on his lips. 

Hawke lets out a warm chuckle. “Fenris, you know Varric can’t keep his mouth shut.” 

Something burns softly around his heart. He’d color it a soft yellow-orange if he could. He snorts aloud, shaking his head and allowing himself the rare, full grin. “Damn that dwarf.” At last, he lets his eyes meet with Hawke’s. “You have no idea what this means to me, Hawke. Thank you, from the deepest parts of my being.” 

His first piece hangs on the wall the next morning, a single red streak across a piece of brown wheat paper, mounted to a crate lid.


End file.
